The present application relates to software and more specifically to user interface designs and methods for graphically displaying and interacting with data or associated computing objects.
Software and accompanying methods for facilitating information visualization are employed in various demanding applications, including enterprise resource planning, scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, market studies, manufacturing production control, drug discovery, and so on. Such applications often demand space-efficient illustrative visualizations for clearly illustrating data and accompanying characteristics, patterns, and interrelationships, while preserving context as the user navigates and views the visualizations.
Illustrative visualizations with features for efficiently preserving context during navigation of the visualizations can be particularly important for mobile enterprise applications, where navigation of large datasets using small mobile device displays can result in lost context, whereby a user forgets or loses track of which part of the overall visualization is currently being displayed after a particular navigation action, e.g., navigation downward in a hierarchy.
Conventional visualizations, such as tree structures, often lack effective mechanisms or features for facilitating preservation of context during navigation. Panning, zooming, scrolling, or jumping to particular nodes, often results in loss of context, especially when using relatively small mobile device displays.